On the Web

Profile Information

Display Name:

nabeel butt

Job Title:

Web Strategist

Company:

Search Engine Lead

Type of Work:

Independent

Location:

Lahore, Pakistan

Favorite Thing About SEO:

It keeps changing.

Bio:

SEO Expert at SEL. I have been a part of SEO industry for 2 years now. I am an enthusiastic learner of new discoveries of SEM industry such as tools, algo changes etc and always ready to share my knowledge with others.

My recent project had this issue. The server was returning 503 not available error for a while on several pages and some certain pages were working normally. Eventually, I lost rankings for all those pages that were playing hide-n-seek with Googlebot and users.

Nice ideas by the way! I would like to add offline stuff such as Magazines and books. They are often considered old-fashioned but have some really triggering ideas in them. Just need an eye to figure and roll them out.

As far as the outreach is concerned, bloggerlinkup is cool but Triberr is doing a good too.

I used to be a big fan of Mighty G but last year decided not to keep all the eggs in the same basket. Eventually, other marketers will follow the footsteps but this is an interesting concept which has been taught to us since childhood. Long time ago, my grandfather advised me to keep money in my socks while travelling around. I never understood what he meant by that but now I totally understand. Keeping a backup of everything is a smart choice and this is what my grandfather taught me! Your story is an eye-opener for all the people specially those who are obsessed with Google specially the employers. =)

Thanks for sharing your personal insights on a hot topic. There are still a lot of webmasters who are unable to overcome it. However, I've personally tried the reconsideration method previously but no success so far. One of my clients had tons of low quality links pointing back to his website and we contacted hundreds of webmasters manually so i know exactly how terrible this whole process is. At the moment, the focus is shifting to Guest blog and i believe people will be over-using it in future. Shall we anticipate another penalty for it?

One of my friends experienced a little fluctuation in results and he probably operates in coupon niche. I was totally unsure of what to answer him but now i can assume it was definitely from Google. At first, it seemed panda/penguin as usual but i couldn't find anything nearer to 13th of December.

@pete do you think Google has been giving so much favor to its own products?

I think Google is just out there to do business just like rest of us and they would definitely take full advantage of their popularity. But i don't see any concrete proof of that yet so if you can experiment with a little more detail on specifically Google's product favour then it would be great.

What they say 'Knowledge maybe the power but you need communication to unlock it'. It wasn't really a typical kind of search engine WBF but it is helpful for every internet user indeed. Let me give a recent example of an email communication i had!!

I sent a couple of emails to one my clients having some audit reports and then my suggestion etc but he didn't respond. All of them were written sweet, short and very brief so i was kind of expecting a reply but i just didn't get it. So i sent him a third email with some stuff again but i mentioned kind of a thing before that "i am looking forward to an instant response". My purpose wasn't to provoke him at all but he actually got furious and i had a very rude reply.

So what i learned from the experience is to write polite and sweet whoever you are writing to. Make it simple and don't ask for too many things in a single email message.

Great post Mike. There has to be something interesting in each website and when it comes to selling products it is hard to find something interesting. Products aren't the only things that can engage people for a long time. However here are a few stories that tell great ideas on how boring industries can generate interesting content:

I totally understand what you said but it is more relevant to a citation. My question is about unstructured citation? What is that and how it can help a business? Assume citation as a link and broken links never give you a bonus point so how an unstructured citation can help? Or maybe Rand was just comparing all parts of a citation with an unstructured citation!

Whiteboard Friday came a bit late today, I was actually keeping an eye at it since Morning and fortunately I got a chance to watch it early. I didn't understand the concept of unstructured citations? When you compare citations with links then how can a broken link help a website similar to your unstructured citations thing!However, I liked the idea of using address, phone anywhere it is possible. I would probably use them on social profiles as well as where direct audience can land to business page.

The main thing behind building links is to build relationships. We'll have to change our priorities now as a SEO. We are more like a live marketer now! have to outreach using emails, telephones, social profiles etc. But the question is how one can show a scalable performance to a client? I don't think you can tell him/her that you've contacted several people on twitter to ask how they are doing in the morning? I just feel it weird to convince clients on that! Otherwise thumbs up for your post and ideas.

This strategy is not new i guess or maybe i've been using it just because of my instinct. To summarize your post is to find some time to SEO the pages where your a backlink or co-citation to your website exists. Not necessarily the cheapos (directories or blog comments) links but one can see if washingtonpost or prweb has published a great story on a particular brand. One can even use guest posts to promote yourself. This could be an efficient mean to improve your social circle with bloggers as well.

In my personal opinion, this tool should also be easy to use for those who aren't SEO's. There are a lot of people who own and manage websites but aren't familiar with Internet Marketing. So this tool should be more easy to use for those non-technical people. But at the moment, even the experts are having a problem with it.The only way i see a way out of it is keep pushing harder and harder every time but still no guarantee of success!

One of my clients actually tried it twice but all went in vain. We actually started before the disavow tool and sent the necessary info to Google in order to get our site back on track but it wasn't enough to satisfy them. Then we've also tried it with disavow tool but no success so far! A lot of people are also asking how much time it requires to recover but we haven't even figured out the removal thing completely yet. Your case study is sound in this regard and it clearly shows they should have launched the disavow as a beta or maybe for only a bunch of webmasters who can test it for a while. It wasn't supposed to be that complicated but i think with time the tool is going to be easier and error-proof!Let's wait for good times :)

I didn't mean that you should be blocking the low-quality/new blogs in fact i am trying to suggest you to implement a system that will differentiate some new blogs, low-quality blogs, highly authorative blogs etc.. at the moment, i see only a couple of columns such as how many articles are published etc.

I am glad it worked for you :) Try to reach as many bloggers as possible with some considerable suggestions and it will work exceptionally in building a relationship. You can even checkout their twitter profiles and suggest them how to write cool twitter profile, if they have a link in their profile check it out or suggest them some cool tweeting ideas etc. This will also help to build a mutual relationship.

Well, an individual can dedicate some time for social platforms. The thing is how you manage your time effectively and i don't think it is any difficult to implement strategies Rand has expressed. You just need to figure out how to manage your time to get things done.

I believe building relationship is going to be the future of SEO. No more crappy directory submissions or other old-fashioned SEO techniques are going to work in a couple of years. All you have to do is build relationships solely to help out readers by providing exceptional content. As you said, no one would like to read your content unless they know you. I guess 4 weeks time frame is a bit scant when it comes to building relationships. If you want to get in touch with people and want to gain a considerable recognition you must participate or help out them with their blogs all the way.

Here's another solid idea to get in touch with a blogger. Write an email suggesting him some SEO-friendly changes he can implement to get most out of his blog. Tell him how to implement a good URL structure, where to use keywords, how to write meta descriptions etc and believe me if they read your email they are gonna love it and hopefully return you the favor with a solid guest post you want to publish.Although, i have tried My blogguest and it was below my expectation. I found only low quality blogs in there therefore i think they need to do a lot more research before adding blogs into it.

Rand, You have made me watch this video again and again to understand guest blogging. I have been looking for blogs to post as a guest publisher and really would like to thank you for the tips you have just shared with us.

Franck! i really appreciate your honest review on the situation an SEO usually tackles. I would tend to add one point that clients sometimes are stubborn to rank on 2,3 keywords that are useless from revenue point of view. Or some even ask you to increase Alexa or page rank so in that case i usually answer them with a straightforward sentence "Alexa won't make you a better income but sales/conversions will do" so don't run behind alexa/PR or don't just ask your SEO guy to rank 2,3 keywords. The SEO may rank some others that can bring more sales/conversions for your business and ultimately you will get a handsome revenue.

Have been in touch with a client nowadays and trying to convince him on the same point i mentioned above.

Hey Rand!I missed your tweet unfortunately and have got a couple of questions;1: Does it affect conversions if a web isn't using https:// protocol and using the simple http://? If yes then using https:// protocoal would require us to add a canonical tag on http:// version and ultimately backlinking should be for http:// version?2: How to handle pagination and sorting URLs when it comes to Google? I have read a lot about the pagination but the functionality of sort by date or others create issues such as duplicate titles, meta descriptions duplication and maybe content duplication etc.. So how can we settle it down?Looking forward to answers as i belive Rand has a magic Wand :)

I would tend to add a bit on reaching out to others. A few years ago one was successful by doing technical stuff but now it is going to be tough for all of us if we don't adopt the social media trends. By social media, i didn't mean facebook, twitter etc instead look at a broader picture. Internet is full of useful content but not all of them are on top, why? because they were never presented to users who were looking for it or they never went viral. So in my opinion the future is of network marketing. Those who have established a reputed network will get success.

I would tend to agree with you that exact anchor text optimization is old fashioned now. With time search engines have become smarter and they can easily figure out such an inorganic campaigns. Recently, Cyrus Shepherd published a story similar to this one on seomoz. For reference and more info on the topic see this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-exact-match-anchor-text-to-next-generation-link-signals-whiteboard-friday

Next generator of Search Engines is trying to become more human. They are catching social signals, link signals etc and trying to react like normal humans so anything that strikes them whether links coming from same anchor texts they are going to find it out and who knows they secretly penalize it!

@Dennis With due respect, i guess you are trapped by a fake SEO master who is trying to earn by telling you fairy tales.. Indeed finding a right person to do SEM is a bet now as sometimes you find legitimate and honest people and sometimes you don't. However, i can suggest one tip: hire someone on a trial basis for 1 month. See what actually he/she's done in the first month. if you get website analysis report, website bugs to be fixed, linking strategies, competitor analysis etc then pay for more months otherwise find someone else.

Just a suggestion from my side to figure out a genuine SEO individual/agency.

I dropped off my jaw to see such a high rates a SEO firm/individual can get. Most of my clients are local business holders and all of them are naive. They are even reluctant to pay me half of the amount Rand mentioned. I believe naive people will never understand the importance of SEO and online marketing unless you generate a solid revenue for them in 3,4 months. Then one can ask for raise in the wages and if you fail to show progress then you are gone!